Laura Restrepo - No Place for Heroes

“Then what’s the hurry? Eat your île flottante in peace and then have some coffee, which is Colombian, of course, one hundred percent Colombian. Because these people may have their beef, but coffee, coffee is our specialty. And if you want, you’ll join us for a little cognac afterward. I promise, Humberto will drive you to your house afterward; and wait until you go inside, so we can all sleep soundly, so your mother can’t say that we have not taken care of her little girl.”

Lorenza finally made it out of that house in the Mercedes owned by the husband and wife, Humberto driving. She had to mislead him so that he wouldn’t find out where she lived on Deán Funes. Let’s head toward Recoleta, Humberto. It was the first thing that came into her head, but she regretted it immediately. Shit, why had she said that? Recoleta is like the cemetery. Or I should say, Recoleta was the name of the most traditional cemetery in Buenos Aires, but also of the neighborhood that surrounded it. Humberto put her at ease when he said, So the señorita lives in Recoleta. Congratulations, it’s a very beautiful place. Very beautiful, yes, thank you, Humberto.

They had been on the way for a while, who knew where, when Lorenza asked, playing the foreigner, Are we in Recoleta yet, Humberto? And since the chauffeur said yes, she replied straightaway, Here, here, Humberto, drop me off on this block, I live nearby, so don’t worry about me, Humberto. I can walk from here. It’s a beautiful night, maybe a brisk walk will refresh me. Right? The best thing after the meal to settle you down.

But Humberto wasn’t buying it. She did not have to worry. He had received an order from his patrones , and he was the type who would fulfill his duty. There was nothing to do but summon Papaíto’s help, because even if it meant paying for it with his life, Humberto was going to drop her off at her door and wait until she went inside. How was she going to get into any of the houses, since none of them were hers?

It wasn’t even her neighborhood. She had never set foot in it. How would she open the door, what key would she use. She was in a bind, when, oh miracle, a couple coming out of a building. This is it, she told herself, help Papaíto, heroes and buffoons. It’s over there, Humberto, that building in the corner. Thanks, Humberto, here, that’s fine, stop. Thanks, Humberto. Stop! Kisses to everyone, ciao, Humberto, ciao. She jumped out of the car trying to reach the door of the building before it closed behind the couple, and she made it. She was inside. She tried to catch her breath. Thanks, Papaíto, I owe you, half a second more and I wouldn’t have made it.

When the driver saw that she was inside, he was content and drove off. Great, we’re free of Saint Humberto. We’re safe, Papaíto, you were stupendous. But maybe not so stupendous, the couple who had just left was locking the door from the outside. What a nightmare. They had locked her in.

Coño , it was really dark, she couldn’t see a thing. Where was the light? Here, here, the light switch. And now where is the button, the one you pressed from inside to open the door. Pawing the walls, she found the damn button and pressed it, but she realized that there were two locks and it had opened only one of them. The second one remained locked at night for security purposes. There was nothing to do, she was locked in.

In other words, a prisoner of this run-of-the-mill building at about one in the morning, hoping that the couple who had left would return, reasoning that if they had keys it was because they lived there, and if they lived there, they would have to return at some point. The light would shut off after a minute and a half and she would turn it back on, not because there was anything to look at but because of how depressing it was to wait in the dark, like Audrey Hepburn, she thought, blind and with her short hairstyle, hiding in the dark from the murderer.

She sat on one of the marble steps and her kidneys must have grown cold because she suddenly needed to pee, adding to her torment, since she had told Sandrita that she would be back by eleven at the latest, and it was almost two. Sandrita probably thought that they were torturing her this very minute. She imagined Sandrita getting the word out — the foreigner has been nabbed, everyone for themselves — or leaping from the balcony in fear of what was to come. Aurelia had to return to the apartment on Deán Funes immediately, but she didn’t dare knock at any of the apartments of her prison building so that they would open the front door. It was unthinkable to do such a thing at that hour. So there she was, with her box of grape-colored Ballys, her inheritance documents, and the letter from Mamaíta, with its beautiful and distraught words.

“Did you get out?” Mateo asked.

“If I hadn’t, you never would’ve been born. Don’t you see that I was going to meet your father the following day? I finally got out around two in the morning when a young man went out and I snuck through right behind him.” That night, at the apartment on Deán Funes, Aurelia couldn’t sleep, mulling over everything in her head. The dinner with that pair of toadies of the military junta had left a sharp thorn lodged within, so white and cultured, the sons of bitches generals, such wonderful horsemen, such steeds. Argentinean values? Right and human? Motherfuckers, they were a bunch of butchers is what they were. And it doesn’t matter how she looked at it, tossing around on the bed, she couldn’t sleep, out of shame for not having said anything. She should have pulled off that tablecloth, embroidered in neat cross-stitching, splattering the omelet and île flottante against the wall. Instead she didn’t say a peep, eating her food bite by bite, at that table, listening to all their perversions and playing the chickenshit, and now how it came back at her, nausea and upset stomach, as if she had swallowed poison.

On top of that there was Sandrita, who as expected had been waiting for her with her hackles up and had torn her to pieces with quite the lecture for arriving at such an hour, that she had frightened the shit out of her and she had been about to flee the house and sound the alarm, that she was a flake, a lightweight, a shitty petit bourgeois. She went on and on, with good reason, and with that obscene fervor that is characteristic of Argentineans when they begin cussing and losing their shit.

“Did Ramón curse?”

“Yes, a lot. He was a real machine gun with four-letter words.”

Aurelia had calmed down somewhat when Sandrita knocked on her bedroom door. She had forgotten to tell her that the meeting with Forcás had been postponed until the following Monday, at six in the afternoon. The leader, Aurelia thought. She muttered that Forcás was definitely headless, and Sandrita took it to mean something else, saying, you have to understand he has a thousand other things to worry about, he’s not here just to attend to you, it’s not that he doesn’t have a head on his shoulders.

“Let’s go to sleep,” Aurelia implored. “It’s almost three in the morning.”

“You’re going to tell me what time it is?”

“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

All this and Sandrita didn’t even know yet that Aurelia had left the shawl she had borrowed at the Colombians’ place … Aurelia realized she didn’t have it way too late, not until she went to bed just before the damn reprimand. Shit, she thought suddenly, the shawl, I left the shawl at that house. Her pulse quickened and the blood beat against her temples. Did I leave it there with Mamaíta’s friends, or had it fallen off while I was imprisoned in the building? If it was in the building, it was gone, but if it was with Mr. and Mrs. Right and Human, they might send Humberto to return it to my supposed apartment in Recoleta, and then they would discover the pile of bullshit that I’d been feeding them, and they would call Bogotá to pass on the rumors, you’ll never guess who has become a subversive.